By Janet Evans
Saturday, Sep 13 2008, 09:03 PM
What can I say…I’m having a bit of a science day on both of my blogs…
In a Burst of Light Gamma rays produce flashes that are brighter than a billion suns yet last only a few milliseconds and have been simply too fast to catch... until now. The artist's concept above depicts the sequence of events as a black hole devours a neutron star, producing gamma-ray bursts as it does so. Using data from the Swift observatory, scientists have gleaned tantalizing evidence of a black hole eating a neutron star--first stretching the neutron star into a crescent, swallowing it, and then gulping up crumbs of the broken star in the minutes and hours that followed.
Image Credit: NASA/Dana Berry
"NASA's Swift satellite detected the explosion - formally named GRB 080319B - at 2:13 a.m. EDT and pinpointed its position in the constellation Bootes. The event, called a gamma-ray burst, became bright enough for human eyes to see. Observations of the event are giving astronomers the most detailed portrait of a burst ever recorded.
"Swift was designed to find unusual bursts," said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We really hit the jackpot with this one."
[…]
In a paper to appear in Thursday's issue of Nature, Judith Racusin of Penn State University and a team of 92 coauthors report on observations across the spectrum that began 30 minutes before the explosion and followed its afterglow for months. The team concludes the burst's extraordinary brightness arose from a jet that shot material directly toward Earth at 99.99995 percent the speed of light.
At the same moment Swift saw the burst, the Russian KONUS instrument on NASA's Wind satellite also sensed the gamma rays and provided a wide view of their spectral structure. A robotic wide-field optical camera called "Pi of the Sky" in Chile simultaneously captured the burst's first visible light. The system is operated by institutions from Poland.
Within the next 15 seconds, the burst brightened enough to be visible in a dark sky to human eyes. It briefly crested at a magnitude of 5.3 on the astronomical brightness scale. Incredibly, the dying star was 7.5 billion light-years away."
Read more at NASA:
"Naked-Eye" Gamma-Ray Burst Was Aimed Squarely At Earth"
Okay...I'll get a little less scientific... after all, it is Saturday night...
Gamma Ray ~ Beck
Gamma Ray
If I could hold
Hold out for now
With these icecaps melting down
With the transistor sound
And my Chevrolet terraplane
Going around around around
Come on little gamma ray
Standing in a hurricane
Your brains are bored like a refugee from a house that's burning
And the heat wave's calling your name
She's got a cactus crown
With a dot dot dot on her brow
And she speaks inside a cloud
With her countenance turning around
It hit me like a gamma ray
Standing in a hurricane
I'm pulling out thorns
Smokestack lightning out my window
I want to know what I've lost today
Come on little gamma ray
Standing in a hurricane
Your body's bored
Like a refugee from a house that's burning
And the backwater's calling your name
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